Latino Voters Overwhelmingly Support Obama’s Executive Action On Immigration

Not surprisingly, a new poll shows that Latino voters overwhelmingly support the President’s executive action on immigration:

Latino voters have Obama’s back again.

That’s according to a new poll by Latino Decisions, for Presente.org and Mi Familia Vota, the first of Latino voters since Obama announced sweeping executive actions, given to BuzzFeed News ahead of its announcement on Monday.

The poll found that 89% of Latino voters support Obama’s decision to give temporary legal status to nearly five million undocumented immigrants. That level of support surprised Latino Decisions co-founder Matt Barreto, who noted the figure is higher than initial support of the president’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protected undocumented youth brought to the country as children from deportation and allowed them to receive work permits.

“This is the most unified we have seen Latino public opinion on any issue,” Barreto told BuzzFeed News. “DACA registered 84%, this is even higher. The White House was smart to put this step to protect parents — almost nobody in the Latino community is going to say they don’t support a policy to keep parents and children together.”

A bilingual staff surveyed 405 randomly selected Latino registered voters nationwide, from Nov. 20 to 22, who are representative of a national sample for the poll.

Obama’s actions affect nearly 3.5 million undocumented immigrant parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents, who have been in the country at least five years.

Barreto said basically every Democratic Latino voter supports the actions, which is not unexpected, but the support holds up across independent and Republican Latino voters, which is an indication of how popular they are.

He said 85% of independents and 76% of Latinos who identify as Republicans support Obama’s move.

The poll also presents a problem for Republicans. They were able to make gains in some states in the midterm elections among Latino voters but the poll suggests opposing the president’s actions will only draw the ire of Latino voters.

Altogether, 80% of voters and 60% of Latino Republicans don’t think the GOP should attempt to cut funding of his order.

“Obama was seeing slippage in his numbers, there was softer Latino turnout and some slippage for Democrats,” Barreto said of the 2014 election. “But it seems like with his action, because it was so bold, with close to 5 million people affected, he seems to have regained that momentum from 2012.”

On some level, of course, this isn’t much of a surprise. The Latino community has been pressing the President to take this action for months, and the Administration took a lot of heat from that quarter when they decided to delay the decision. It’s also not entirely surprising that the support is broad based across the political spectrum among Latino voters. What will be interesting to see is how it plays with voters as a whole when broader polling drops, which may come in the days before Thanksgiving but may not come until well after that depending on how quickly polling organizations move on this issue.

FILED UNDER: Borders and Immigration, Public Opinion Polls, Race and Politics, US Politics, , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. LaMont says:

    What will be interesting to see is how it plays with voters as a whole when broader polling drops, which may come in the days before Thanksgiving but may not come until well after that depending on how quickly polling organizations move on this issue.

    Prediction – If will pretty much be supported by Democrats and Independents while Republicans will hate it – which again, presents a problem for Republicans.

  2. James Pearce says:

    He said 85% of independents and 76% of Latinos who identify as Republicans support Obama’s move.

    Woah……

    That should give GOP strategists pause, make them re-think their approach.

  3. LaMont says:

    @James Pearce:

    Ha

    It should. The real question is will it? Right now republicans are backed into a corner trying to decide between these three options;

    1 – Work out a bill that could give President Obama limited political victory

    2 – Continue to throw crap and see what sticks

    3 – Bark loud initially than wait it out to see if it all blows over

  4. stonetools says:

    @LaMont:

    They do have the voter supression option. I think this, and trying to turn out their base, is the plan for 2016.

  5. grumpy realist says:

    Isn’t this a self-funded program?

  6. LaMont says:

    @stonetools:

    I thought about that right after my edit time expired. Then I also thought – even thats a short term solution as demographics continue to change. I mean, how much voter suppression can they pass before blatantly violating the constitution or being outed as a party almost everyone with any decency would not want to associate themselves with?

  7. Neil Hudelson says:

    @LaMont:

    Well, we are going on 9 years so far…

    (I mark the Terry Schiavo debacle as the departure point from the party of Eisenhower and GHWB, to the party of lunatics.)

  8. stonetools says:

    @LaMont:

    I mean, how much voter suppression can they pass before blatantly violating the constitution

    Ah, but who decides what is a constitutional violation? They’ve got John “Jim Crow” Roberts and Clarence “Stephen” Thomas backing their play there. I think they have a lot of running room -at least till 2020, when we can reverse their gerrymandering and start the long process of winning back power at the state level.
    A lot can happen before 2020.

    One problem here is that the conservatives understand they are at war. They’ve never conceded the liberals were right in 1932 or 1964 or in 2008. They see those as setbacks to be reversed, not as arguments lost. Liberals think they are in a d@mned debating society, where if they win the argument through logic and evidence, the battle is over. It’s the mistake the liberal in the White House made, which is why the conservatives came back so fast..

  9. michael reynolds says:

    Obviously the Latinos polled had not yet heard the clever right wing meme about escaping Latin Americans dictators and their death squads to flee to America only to find a far worse dictator who refuses to deport the parents of American children.

    See, ’cause then they’d see that death squads aren’t so bad. Compassion is far more dangerous.

  10. anjin-san says:

    @michael reynolds:

    escaping Latin Americans dictators and their death squads

    Frankly, a death squad might be a welcome relief from the tyranny of Obama.

    Even as I type, I can feel the weight of his oppressing crushing me.

  11. al-Ameda says:

    @stonetools:

    Liberals think they are in a d@mned debating society, where if they win the argument through logic and evidence, the battle is over. It’s the mistake the liberal in the White House made, which is why the conservatives came back so fast..

    Indeed. The last Democratic Party politician of stature who understood the need to fight back strongly was Lyndon Johnson. Modern Democrats, with the exception of Nancy Pelosi and even Harry Reid, are far too passive in the face of unrelenting Republican opposition.

  12. DrDaveT says:

    @al-Ameda:

    Modern Democrats, with the exception of Nancy Pelosi and even Harry Reid, are far too passive in the face of unrelenting Republican opposition.

    I could wish that the least passive Democrats were better leaders and thinkers. Pelosi and Reid are accurately characterized as mere party machine operators; they cannot lead America anywhere, for good or ill. The Republic Party boasts any number of innovative and persistent demagogues who are fully equipped and prepared to lead America right off a cliff.

    Leadership is greatly hampered by uncertainty; conservatives (and fascists) are in general less prone to uncertainty than progressives are. After all, it’s easy to be clear on what you don’t want to change, or which comfortable (possibly mythical) past you’d like to return to, but much harder to be confident about what to change and how.